By Kevin Casey – As with many new software implementations, there’s a build-or-buy choice when getting started with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). 

On the build side, you can write your own bots from scratch, provided you’ve got the right people and budget in place. On the buy side, there’s a burgeoning marketplace of commercial software vendors offering RPA in various flavors, as well as overlapping technologies. (Some market themselves under different but related terms like “intelligent automation.”)

In fact, Gartner previously called RPA the fastest-growing enterprise software segment of 2018, with 63 percent growth in worldwide revenues. It’s a competitive market, too – you’ve got options. Moreover, commercial RPA vendors have generally made a point to prioritize ease of use, in the hopes of enabling non-developers to be able to create and deploy bots without a ton of technical overhead. Some of the commercial vendors offer a “freemium” product as a way of enticing prospective customers to kick the tires on their platforms. Read On: